Soonish Giveaway

It would likely be a sort of unending state of near-fully immersive 'flow' in every individual, brought about by a massive amount of data matching each person with their optimum media/content. Push entertainment would be the main form, but the content offered would be highly dynamic and accurate, meaning you were almost always offered your favourite possible thing at that moment in time. I think a good clue lies in the multicellularity of modern organisms and the optimised progression/differentiation of Stem Cells through the human body. Each cell is funnelled into a role most fitting of its composition, thereby altering its composition, and repeating the process. It is in the imperfect matching of individuals to roles (ie imperfect decision making based on incomplete information) that we get the cycles of pleasure and pain that we associate with life. As to what effect that would have on Qualia, I'm not sure. Assuming the matching process was perfected (which is unlikely, given that the rate of information transfer is capped), perhaps each individual would exist in a state of nothingness, perhaps timeless bliss - if there is a difference.

As to what it would look like to an external observer, I believe one of two options exists. Either we all learn and correlate data with some giant server simultaneously, or we go through cycles of 'exploring' and then 'plug in' somewhere at the end of the 'day' to upload all of our experiences, which would then be correlated and provide us with a new set of matches to explore the next 'day'. Essentially dreaming would become a collective act, I think. With abstracted correlations being made in 'the cloud'. The question, I believe, is whether we would be living in a perpetual highly optimised waking dream or have a segregated wake/dream cycle. The latter seems like it would be more life-like, by our current understanding.

/r/SMBCComics Thread